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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8241122" data-attributes="member: 18">Dude, you played the grog card first. You literally aren't allowed to complain about it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />As for the rest of it, well, I'm very jealous of your martini (in the whole of COVID I think I've maybe had three beers - I only drink socially and it seemed like this would be baaaad time to change that lol), but I feel like maybe I'd need a number to martinis to really get what you're saying. But maybe not let's see.THEY DON'T SAY THAT NOW!!! ARRRRGH! Why would anyone say that??!?!?!!??!?!Ruin jumps into 60' deep pit with spikes at the bottom and diesI mean for god's sake nobody says that now except in an RP sense. They describe how they solve the puzzle, otherwise it's not a puzzle for the players, it's just some kind of challenge for the characters, which is a different thing. The old-skool equivalent would be writing in a in-setting language which wasn't a code-cipher, and which required either a PC to speak that language (and often the DM could be sure none could, because it was some obscure dead language), and which required magic to read. The players don't "work out the translation" because they can't, they just say my character casts [appropriate spell] and then the DM tells them what it says (yes I can't remember which spell translates text - like I said I need a martini too!).You're apparently complaining about something that's not a real problem. This is very internet. And very "get off my lawn", except the kids aren't on your lawn, they standing on the sidewalk and you just think they're on your lawn!This is the most interesting point I'm getting here, but the reality is, that's still effectively how it works in most groups. You can't just say "I roll an investigation check", you have to say what your PC is doing, then the DM says "roll an investigation check", or maybe you describe it so well, that's not even necessary, and the DM just says "Oh you said you looked under the front of the desk? Then you see a scroll stuck there!", with no need for check. Very modern-style TT RPGs actually reinforce this point - fiction first - the player describes what they want to do, the DM is there to tell them what to roll, if they even need to roll, and often they don't.That's really the same way as ever.If anything, there was a period in 3.XE, when that approach did decline a bit in favour of "everything has a DC, everything can be rolled on", and when the advice to DMs was perhaps a little less clear on the fiction-first approach, but that's in the past now, and I've seen people new to D&D playing 5E, and they play it the fiction-first way - i.e. description of action, then roll dice if the DM tells them to. I mean, just go watch YouTube of people playing 5E or whatever.There is a I think a genuinely interesting underlying point here, which is mostly to do with spells. In early D&D, spells were basically the only time you got to tell the DM what happened, as it were. I mean, he/she was still in charge, but if you wanted to do something without a spell, it was kind of "Mother May I?". Whereas if you had a spell, it said it what it did, and the DM kind of had "put that in his pipe and smoke it", as it were. And what we've seen evolve is characters who don't have spells gradually get access to more abilities which aren't "Mother May I?", but rather stuff like, "My character can jump 30ft", so you don't have to say "Oh DM, can my character jump 30ft?" "No.", because it's on your character sheet that you could.But spellcasters have always had that.And I think did we just find the root cause of LFQW? Kinda? Of the basic imbalance between casters and non-casters? I'm sure it's actually a well-visited place with a gift shop and so on, but I think this is a kind of key point - casters got to say what happened (which is thematically kind of appropriate from a sort of Sparrowhawk-ish/TH White Merlin-ish perspective especially), whereas other people had to ask.Feels like there's some kind of experimental indie RPG in there - where you have some players who can tell the DM, and some players who have to ask the DM.</blockquote>

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